Each and every one of the thirty-odd grottos will repay long observation, even on the part of the most casual visitor, and when one has seen them all, he will know more at first hand of the method of life of the creatures of the sea than all the books could teach him. He will depart fully satisfied, and probably, if he be the usual sight-seer, he will never suspect that what he has seen is really but an incidental part of the institution whose building he has entered. Even though he note casually the inscription "Stazione Zoôlogica" above the entrance, he may never suspect that the aquarium he has just visited is only an adjunct--the popular exhibit, so to speak--of the famous institution of technical science known to the English-speaking world as the Marine Biological Laboratory at Naples. Yet such is the fact. The aquarium seems worthy enough to exist by and for itself. It is a great popular educator as well as amuser, yet its importance is utterly insignificant compared with the technical features of the institution of which it is an adjunct. This technical department, the biological laboratory proper, has its local habitation in the parts of the building not occupied by the aquarium--parts of which the general public, as a rule, sees nothing. There is, indeed, little to see that would greatly interest the casual inspector, for in its outward aspects one laboratory is much like another, a seeming hodgepodge of water-tanks, glass jars of specimens, and tables for microscopes. The real status of a laboratory is not determined by the equipment. And yet it will not do to press this assertion too far, for in one sense it is the equipment of the Naples laboratory that has made it what it is. Not, however, the equipment in the sense of microscopes and other working paraphernalia. These, of course, are the best of their kind, but machinery alone does not make a great institution, any more than clothes make the man. The all-essential and distinctive equipment of the laboratory reveals itself in its personnel. In the present case, as always in a truly great institution of any kind, there is one dominating personality, one moving spirit. This is Dr. Anton Dohrn, founder of the laboratory, and still its controller and director, in name and in fact. More than twenty-five years ago Dr. Dohrn, then a young man fresh from the universities of his native Germany, discovered what he felt to be a real need in the biological world. He was struck with the fact that nowhere in the world could be found an establishment affording good opportunities for the study of marine life. Water covers three-fifths of the earth's surface, as everybody knows, and everywhere this water teems with life, so that a vast preponderance of the living things of the globe find their habitat there. Yet the student who might desire to make special studies of this life would find himself balked at the threshold for want of opportunity.